Galloping Galápagos!

I was hoping to use Storyhouse to host pictures from my upcoming trip to South America. I’d used them to create a couple of slideshows before and I liked the mobile app and the features. But they were bought by Square last year and shutdown. My beautiful “Makin’ Muffins” story (including video and the recipe) is 404d forever.

I could use Microsoft’s Sway to do the same thing. Mary Jo Foley does and it looks great. And I don’t anticipate Microsoft will be going out of business in my lifetime (or be sold to Square) but who knows how long they’ll host my story?

So. Do you have a suggestion for a WordPress plugin or some such hostable tool for posting quick slideshows from the road. Extra points for a mobile app. Once I get home I will put my pictures on Flickr and Smugmug as per usual. I’m looking for an easy, low bandwidth solution I can use in Machu Picchu and the Galápagos.

UPDATE: After some thought I realized the best solution would be something self-hosted that allowed structured posting of pictures, video, audio, text, and, ideally, maps. In other words, an online travel journal. And if I could embed the resulting slideshow here that would be even better. Looks like there’s something just right from GIS firm Esri: Story Map Journal. Esri provides the maps and will host it free for non-commercial users, and the source is on github. I’ll be playing with it before I leave and let you know.

UPDATE 2: Esri’s Story Map Journal turns out to be way too complicated to use on the road, especially with limited bandwidth. Instead I’m going to use a Google Photos Album to do create my travel journal. This fits into my usual workflow anyway. At the end of every day I copy the photos I’ve taken from my DSLR to my Google Pixel XL (Canon and Sony provide an app to do this.) Then the phone copies the photos to Google Photos. This often takes many hours, but with Google Fi I generally have decent and inexpensive bandwidth in most countries. Once my photos are on the net I can put them into the Google Photos album I’ve already created. By the time I return I should have a decent photo album, complete with maps, to post or even print now that Photos offers photo books.

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